I have a confession. In my younger years I greatly enjoyed making a homophobic fuckwit plotz by pointing out that their favorite celebrity was homosexual. They hardly ever believed me but I saw an opportunity to put a chink in the armor of their bigotry and I leapt on it with glee. Lately I’ve reflected and not only was it a bit tacky of me to out celebs who maybe wanted to stay private — a fact that hit home particularly when I started working for some of the more private on

I’ve told you before how I am a sort of time traveler, inhabiting worlds and activities from a bygone era. This is a common pastime of the very wealthy; they want to trap the world in amber. When I was fourteen I worked as a mother’s helper for one of the old monied families in Southampton. They lived in a mansion behind a towering hedge. I’ll call this family the Banks. [Although I am not as cute as Mary Poppins, this is in every other regard an accurate picture of the famil

The French embraced jazz music very early. It may have been that there was a direct pipeline from the  cradle of New Orleans to the streets of Paris that allowed the music to immediately find roots in France. The French continue to love jazz to this day and it has become an integral part of French identity. Although the French can be as bigoted as any nation, they do seem to practice color blindness when an individual has sufficient talent to “surpass” their roots and they ar